


You're The Best

by sabswrites



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Crush, F/F, Getting Together, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 12:36:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11335749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabswrites/pseuds/sabswrites
Summary: With busy teenage schedules filled with school, band practice, running and operating your militia, you often loose touch of old friends. However, the powers that be do as they please, and sometimes you may reunite.orRemember that one two second conversation Tamika and Basimah had in Toast? I decided they should be girlfriends.





	You're The Best

“19:05” read 15-year-old Tamika Flynn’s MTM Special Ops Black SEAL Military Diver watch. “19:05” Tamika repeated in her head. “19:05” Tamika muttered out loud. She sighed as she sheathed her mambele throwing dagger and walked away from her post. She had been patrolling the exterior of the dog park for abnormalities and glanced a final time in each direction. To her right, there was a small group of people starting into the sky and screaming at its terrifying emptiness, and to her left, there was a hooded figure picking up littered plastic bottles; nothing out of the ordinary. 

As she walked down the street, nodding politely at the various vague yet menacing government agents she came across poorly hidden in bushes and behind benches, she found herself reminiscing on her favorite quote from Albert Camus’ _“The Stranger.”_

_”I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”_

She chuckled slightly as she thought of this. It had always been one of her favorite jokes. Meanwhile, lacking her normal vigilance she harshly crashed into something. Instinctively, she reached for her dagger, yet stopped when she realized what she had collided with. 

“Tamika, hey!” A bright voice called. The voice belonged to a visible body who stood smiling in jeans, a dark purple hijab, and a t-shirt that read _blood moon_ in a small sans-serif scrawl below a cartoon of a smiling sun; Basimah Bashara was as radiant as ever. 

“Basimah, It’s been a while!” Tamika replied. Tamika and Basimah had been good friends in elementary and middle school but had drifted since high school started. They had simply developed different interests, with Basimah being the lead guitarist in her thrash band and Tamika’s organization and leadership of a heavily armed militia. 

“Yeah, we’ve sort of drifted ever since you decapitated that librarian a few years ago,” Basimah said, “which is still so cool by the way.” 

Tamika blushed slightly as she reminisced on one of her most treasured memories. Staring the beast right in the spot where most creatures would have eyes, and swiftly decapitating it, recusing herself and her summer reading group from the clutches of evil. 

“Thank you, I take immense pride in this feat. As the great poet Thomas Gray once said in his _Hymn To Adversity,_

_‘Thy form benign, O Goddess, wear,_  
Thy milder influence impart,  
Thy philosophic Train be there  
To soften, not to wound my heart.’” 

“Oh yeah, I think I read that in a fortune cookie once,” Basimah said. “Anyways what are you doing here?” 

“Just routine surveillance.”

“Oh, what are you looking for?” 

“We’re not sure yet, but if we did that’d be classified obviously,” Tamika grinned before continuing, “Why are you here?” 

“Just picking up some stuff for my mom,” Basimah gestured to the grocery bag in her hand, “Bread, eggs, hot milk for the hot milk drawer, stuff like that. I should probably get going, but it was really nice seeing you! Text me sometime yeah?”

“I will,” Tamika said, and she intended on it. 

“See you later, Tamika!”

“See you.”

As Basimah walked away, Tamika watched the sunset overhead, and with a strange twinge in her chest, she was reminded of the words of the great philosopher, Shakira.

_“In the full light of day, I don't want to think about the sunset.”_

She thought about this as she walked home. She thought about Basimah too, and how much she had truly missed her presence in her life. She also thought about her mambele throwing dagger, and how a standard machete would be a more appropriate option for her next rounds. Thinking of all of these things, she sat down on her favorite rock in her front yard and pulled out a small book from inside her jacket. It was a worn pocket edition of Sun Tzu’s _Art of War_ , in its original Chinese. 

She sat in the cool air, and read, the only visible light coming from the diminishing sun and the blinking light atop the radio tower.  
-

Basimah loved to write. It was mainly small stuff, the follies of her teenaged brain. But Basimah loved to write, and she wrote all the time, no matter how good it was. That determination she thought, was the thing she loved most about herself. She brought a journal with her wherever she went and filled it with everything that came into her mind. She sat at her desk, looking down at her two most recent entries. 

The first one was a short poem she had written in the back garden: 

_flowers and girls remind me of each other;_  
each glows under sunlight and can be found  
in all colors and types, each  
as lovely as the last. 

The other one was a diary entry from the other day:

**June 6**

**I saw Tamika Flynn last evening! It reminded me of how close we used to be, and of how much I missed her. It’s really strange, and a bit sad I suppose, how people drift apart as the never ceasing weirdness of time passes over them. You could trust someone with absolutely everything, and then a few years, or even months later, not know them anymore. I try to stop this from happening to me as much as possible, to keep in touch across barriers of time and space, but it’s hard. It reminds me a bit of my dad I guess, how to him he hugged me last week, but I’ve been struggling not to forget him for years. Time is confusing, distance is weird. On the other hand, Tamika is someone I could plausibly reconnect with, and I think I’d really like that! She looked super pretty too, so there’s that.**

She sighed reading these over and began absentmindedly doodling in the margins. She drew a bouquet of wildflowers next to her poem; cornflowers and daisies tied together with a loose bow. Near the diary entry, she drew a sketch of a face with coiled hair tied up in a bun, and slight freckles across the brown nose. And, feeling particularly safe, she added a tiny heart in the corner. 

“Basi!” Her mother called from downstairs, “Basi, come down here!” 

With that, Basimah slammed the journal shut and shoved it haphazardly in her drawer, away from all (excluding government agents, secret police, and the faceless old woman who secretly lived in her home). 

When Tamika and Basimah were kids, they used to have a special tree in Mission Grove Park. Scientifically it was a normal tree, but it was special in the sense that they spent a lot of time there. They would sit together and Tamika would read (only municipally approved books in public) while Basimah wrote stories in her journal. 

Tamika still went there sometimes, it was a nice spot. Far away enough to avoid onlookers yet not so far as to warrant suspicion. It was one of her thinking places; she was usually thinking or not thinking. 

She sat down leaning her back up against the tree and stopped not thinking. She had thought of Basimah a lot since she ran into her a few days prior, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about her. How do you feel about someone who used to be your best friend and then stopped being your best friend for no precise cause? When something doesn't have a precise cause, it’s nearly impossible to make sense of it. 

_“Reasoning is the root of rationalizing.”_ Someone in some dimension thought at some point in time. 

Turning over a worn copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s _The Second Sex_ , she sighed. She wondered if Basimah had been thinking about her too. She wondered if Basimah came to the tree anymore like she did. She wondered what that buzzing noise in the distance was and brandished a serrated, liner lock pocket knife from her belt. As soon as she did this, however, the noise stopped and she wondered too if she had imagined it. When she had grown tired of wondering, she stopped and began reading. 

-  
Sometimes when she lacked the inspiration to write, Basimah liked to take walks around down. Something about being surrounded by nature drew out her creativity. That and that fact that there were distinctively fewer amounts of hidden cameras in nature than in her home-- not none, but fewer. 

She walked past the whispering forest and it complimented her eyeliner and she sharply increased her pace, and by city hall where she heard the familiar growls and snarls of the city council. Then she walked over to the park where she sat on a bench only a moment before noticing a familiar a figure sitting below a tree. 

she thought in unison with someone somewhere distant and unimportant to this story 

She realized that she knew exactly where Tamika was, or maybe _why_ she was would be more accurate, as her eyes already told her where. It was the leafy oak tree she had used to write under since middle school. It was 15 feet tall and curved at the top. As she walked towards it, she felt her breathing shift and the air around her become lighter. 

“You still come here too?” 

Tamika calmly looked up and then down at her book again. “It’s a nice spot,” she replied, and then looked back up realizing looking down was rude. “I come here to read and contemplate battle strategies.” 

Basimah smiled and sat down. “I come here a lot too. Mainly just to be somewhere you know?” 

“In the words of both Alexander Pope, and the mysterious voice who once whispered it in my near my head, _‘as the twig is bent so grows the tree,’_ ” Tamika said. 

“Yeah, something like that I guess,” Basimah breathed and tucked a tress of hair behind her ear. “So, I think I’ve been missing you lately. But it’s a weird kind of missing, where I’m not sure whether I’m longing for something that already happened or if I’m somehow missing the possibility of something that could happen in the future.” 

“I feel the same, and I think it’s because I have a crush on you, but it could also be repressed insecurities with my knife throwing accuracy.” 

Basimah leaned closer and pressed her lips slightly to Tamika’s cheek, “It’d be cool if it was the first one.”

Tamika grinned, “You’re the best.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading this story about a very specific ship that I don't actually think I've seen any one talk about? I thought it would be fun to write a little drabble about two of my favorite secondary characters so I hope whoever looks for and actually reads something like this (you presumably) enjoyed it!
> 
> come say hi at spaceclub.tumblr.com !!


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